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Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

beets.io

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Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#101

Post by terinjokes »

timcobb wrote: post #100
intrikate wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just split everything into tracks like they are on the album. Is there a tangible benefit to a single large FLAC with a CUE to tell the player where the songs are?

There are a few benefits in my opinion, mainly: - The CUE maps the audio in a "CD-native" way, like each track can have 1 or more indices, which enables things like pregaps. When you split FLACs into discrete tracks you need to figure out how to project that onto files, do you put the pregaps at the end of previous tracks? At the beginning of next tracks? In short, with a CUE you can emulate the CD experience more ac…

I've been thinking about this recently too, mostly to figure out how to preserve indexes in tracks of "Murmurs of Earth"[0]. I think the FLAC embedded cuesheets could be used for this. While intended for CD-ready cuesheets embedded into one big FLAC, there's no reason they couldn't be used in individual files, with index 00 for pregaps.

I'm not sure it's well supported anywhere however. Maybe foobar2000?

Edit: I pulled up the RFC[1] for FLAC, and it seems like this is a use case they had in mind for the embedded cuesheet:

> A cuesheet metadata block can be used either [...] or to provide a mechanism to store locations of interest within a FLAC file.

[0]: https://www.discogs.com/release/6057232

[1]: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9639.html#name-cuesheet

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#102

Post by lrobinovitch »

tuukkao wrote: post #14

If you're using Navidrome or similar to stream your music then check out beets-alternatives [0]. It lets you sync (and optionally convert) your library or a subset of it to another location, in my case my music storage mounted with Rclone. It's especially useful if you need to have a different naming structure in your target directory for whatever reason. I like to keep each disc of a multi-disc album in in its own s…

Nice! Have you figured out how to manage album art with beets-alternatives?

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#103

Post by nimih »

hamdingers wrote: post #68
mrmekon wrote: post #28

I spent a truly obnoxious amount of time importing my music library into beets. It took a couple of weeks to get to 95% imported, and got so bogged down in the last 5% that I never completed the import and never switched over. This isn't necessarily a fault with beets, really, but a model mismatch. The model of beets is very, very strongly tied to associating each imported item to one well-known, commercial release.…

Everyone else is telling you to go update musicbrainz, and that's a sensible course of action for the first two bullets, but the much easier path is to import all these files with whatever metadata they have. There is no canonical metadata for a fan recording of a concert or DIY CD-R, so you lose out on nothing by importing the files as they are today. Once you're over the hump of the first import, beets is a fabulou…

This is the answer I arrived at myself a few hours into importing my own music library. Cleaning up metadata for commercial releases is a nice feature beets offers, but the real value (IMO) of beets is it's a powerful toolbox for managing a large music library, and that's true even if you were to eschew musicbrainz integration for all your music.

I do think it's a pretty fair complaint that it really feels like the software is fighting against you when you first encounter something absent from the musicbrainz database (especially if it's something fundamentally unsuited to be added to the database), but I'm not sure if there's an easy solution other than telling people "just hit the `import with existing metadata' button, it's totally fine" when they complain about it.

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#104

Post by nimih »

tasuki wrote: post #92
mrmekon wrote: post #28

I spent a truly obnoxious amount of time importing my music library into beets. It took a couple of weeks to get to 95% imported, and got so bogged down in the last 5% that I never completed the import and never switched over. This isn't necessarily a fault with beets, really, but a model mismatch. The model of beets is very, very strongly tied to associating each imported item to one well-known, commercial release.…

> Each was eventually possible, but sometimes it took hours to figure out how to import a specific folder. Thanks for saving me time, I guess? I just maintain very spartan id3 tags on my music, artist, album, song name, track id, and that's about it. What more would beets give me? How would it improve my experience?

It provides a nice interface for managing and editing tags that integrates well with other command-line tools and keeps your file system well-organized/up-to-date as you edit the tag contents. The batteries-included integration with datasources like musicbrains and discogs is nice, but, at least for me, beets is mainly a better tool for accomplishing the same tag and file janitoring I was doing with things like foobar2000 and eyeD3 a decade ago.

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#105

Post by brewdad »

alisonatwork wrote: post #57
Semaphor wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> actually, which makes me wonder why I'm keeping all these FLACs around Sometime last year, I actually redownloaded all my BC files, and reripped all my CDs (had to re-do genres, but that was fine, I wanted cleaner genres anyway). It’s simply archival. Lossless means you can convert it to whatever file you might want in the future without loss of quality. This made extra sense for my CD rips, because many of those w…

I'm wondering about diminishing returns, because up until switching to FLAC about 10 years ago I ripped all my CDs to 320k and thus only have about 20 files in my "low bitrate" auto playlist that are weird indie or bootleg things that I couldn't bring myself to delete for nostalgia reasons. Is FLAC really all that much better? Can anybody hear the difference? I don't want to spend months awkwardly moving thousands of…

The core benefit to me of FLAC is that it's lossless. I can convert the same file to an MP3 for the car and OPUS on my phone and don't have to worry about (compounding) losses in quality.

I stream FLAC at home because I already have it there but I can't say it's "better" than 320 MP3s.

I did a re-rip project during Covid because so many of my rips were 128 bit MP3 from back when storage costs drove all CD ripping decisions.

Edit:typos

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#107

Post by squigz »

Hamuko wrote: post #42
squigz wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fan recordings/edits/anything that shouldn't be on Musicbrainz just gets imported as-is, with maybe some metadata additions/tweaks. > * brand new indie label releases (bandcamp) > * commercial albums variants missing from musicbrainz/discogs This is a great opportunity to fill in those blanks for those services :) I didn't have much to contribute to MB but did have a few albums to add.

> Fan recordings/edits/anything that shouldn't be on Musicbrainz Those should be on MusicBrainz. There's even a bootleg release type for fan recordings/illegal copies, and official style guides for live bootlegs. https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Specific_types_of_releases...

That's really surprising! I would think they'd want some kind of "official" source for such things, otherwise you'd end up with numerous entries for random live recordings of varying quality.

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#108

Post by timcobb »

terinjokes wrote: post #101
timcobb wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a few benefits in my opinion, mainly: - The CUE maps the audio in a "CD-native" way, like each track can have 1 or more indices, which enables things like pregaps. When you split FLACs into discrete tracks you need to figure out how to project that onto files, do you put the pregaps at the end of previous tracks? At the beginning of next tracks? In short, with a CUE you can emulate the CD experience more ac…

I've been thinking about this recently too, mostly to figure out how to preserve indexes in tracks of "Murmurs of Earth"[0]. I think the FLAC embedded cuesheets could be used for this. While intended for CD-ready cuesheets embedded into one big FLAC, there's no reason they couldn't be used in individual files, with index 00 for pregaps. I'm not sure it's well supported anywhere however. Maybe foobar2000? Edit: I pull…

Not sure, I could never get my mind around foobar2000. I've just been playing my single-file CUE/(FLAC|APE)s in VLC ;-(

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#109

Post by Hamuko »

squigz wrote: post #107
Hamuko wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fan recordings/edits/anything that shouldn't be on Musicbrainz Those should be on MusicBrainz. There's even a bootleg release type for fan recordings/illegal copies, and official style guides for live bootlegs. https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Specific_types_of_releases...

That's really surprising! I would think they'd want some kind of "official" source for such things, otherwise you'd end up with numerous entries for random live recordings of varying quality.

I think the only thing I've seen is that there should be at least some notoriety to the bootlegs. Like that it's a bootleg that's been circulating around in fan communities or a batch of fake CDs sold in some shady market or a leaked version of an upcoming album shared on P2P. Something that makes it beyond just a thing between a couple of people.

I think if you read through the MusicBrainz about page, it makes a lot more sense:

>As an encyclopedia and as a community, MusicBrainz exists only to collect as much information about music as we can. We do not discriminate or prefer one "type" of music over another, and we try to collect information about as many different types of music as possible. Whether it is published or unpublished, popular or fringe, western or non-western, human or non-human — we want it all in MusicBrainz.

Re: Beets: The music geek’s media organizer

#110

Post by Hamuko »

henrebotha wrote: post #67

Beets crashes with a Musicbrainz connection error more than half the time, on my machine. How does anyone use it productively?

MusicBrainz is currently being hammered by AI scrapers. There's a pull request on the Beets GitHub that seems to address the crashing.
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